The purpose of this study is to gain an understanding of the characteristics of Japanese idioms which are difficult to foreign learners, because they are non-compositional, unanalyzable, and consist of unmotivated semantic units. Specifically, I want to underscore the characters of Japanese idioms used in the spoken language that are rarely highlighted in precedent studies, in order to determine whether a textbook of Japanese idioms can help the learners who want to speak Japanese fluently in daily conversation, and whether Japanese learners who speak Korean as a mother language feel difficultly in comparison to when they learn other foreign languages. In addition, I would like to suggest a list of Japanese idioms and strategic learning guidelines for Japanese learners who speak Korean as a mother language and wish to communicate with Japanese people in daily conversation. The results of this study can be seen in the three following sections.
1) The characteristics of Japanese comics(Mangas) are summarized into three areas as follows: ①The idioms can be divided 13 categories. ②The three high ranks of the idioms are in the category of the physical parts of human body, of the mind, and of the behavior. ③The idioms of the physical parts of human body, the first rank of the categories, mostly consist of the mouth, the eyes, or the head.
2) It should be pointed out that the Japanese learners who speak Korean as mother language felt that understanding Japanese idioms is less difficult than other foreign language idioms, because 20% can be translated totally and literally, and 32% can be translated partially and literally.
3) I have found a list of 15 common idioms in the textbook and the Japanese comics(Mangas), along with 4 strategic learning guidelines.
Though I have studied the correspondence between Korean and Japanese idioms by using a general approach, it is necessary to further study the correspondence between idioms of these two languages individually and concretely in future. In addition, these current results are based only on Japanese comics, and in future research I want to observe the differences among other varieties of media such as print media(magazines, newspapers, etc.) and visual media(movies, dramas, etc.).